Creative Climate Leadership

An intensive training course for artists and cultural professionals to enable climate leadership in their own creative practice.

The success of the COP21 UN Climate Talks and the first universal agreement on climate change – the Paris Agreement – has called for urgent, collaborative and distributed leadership with creativity at its heart. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to below 2°C requires a bold rethinking of the way we live and work.

Artists and the wider cultural community have a unique and critical role: they deal with the art of the possible and influence new ways of being, doing and thinking. Creative Climate Leadership supports cultural professionals to apply these qualities to the climate challenge. The programme is tailored for participants to reach their full potential and maximise action on climate change within the creative and cultural sector, with help and support to test and scale ideas through sharing best practice and discussion across countries and cultures. It enables participants to explore the cultural dimensions of climate change and take action with impact, creativity and resilience.

How is CCL structured?

An intensive residential leadership course

The intensive course enables participants to apply environmental targets and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals meaningfully to their work, and explore what leadership means in the context of a rapidly changing world. It includes modules on three core critical competencies.

The operating context: key scientific, economic and policy decisions that frame the environmental challenge, including climate change, sustainable development and international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement.

Sustainable culture: how culture empowers, influences and affects change. This includes cultural trends, creative engagement, green business infrastructure, management and investment/funding, partnerships and collaborations, scaling change, audience development and entrepreneurship.

An extended creative project

Every participant commits to developing a self-initiated, extended creative project for the duration of the Creative Climate Leadership course, with the intention of applying their learning from the course. Participants develop a project from concept to delivery and commit to leveraging any required funding/capital to resource it. These are developed within a host organisation or as a standalone venture. Creative projects might include a creative engagement programme; building sustainability into their organisational mission; a communications campaign or research project. The extended creative projects are developed by the participant with support from Julie's Bicycle.

The JB Fellowship

All participants who complete the Creative Climate Leadership programme become a JB Fellow, and have access to exclusive opportunities to continue their professional development. As JB Fellows, CCL participants are able to connect to course alumni and a wider, global network of intelligent professionals working on climate and creativity.

Accelerator is a new strand of work within the pioneer Arts Council England Environmental Programme, recruiting two Cohorts of up to ten organisations to work with Julie’s Bicycle to advance their sustainable practice.